Sorry for the lack of thumbnails or multi-sized images on the old gallery site. Just click one of the "no thumbnail" links and then do the usual slideshow thing. The toolkit will get added back eventually for that stuff.

"God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them."-- Stephen William Hawking (b. 1942) --

That's just the NWNCQ Project stuff. I only use it for Trade Fairs and other events, since I don't like the roof tiles for normal play either, and they totally change the colors on a lot of things (messes up colors in a lot of areas we have). The separate NWShader is kinda nifty too, if you like messing with it, but not simple to use (CQ was made to work with it).

*edits* Might be some of Sarm's old undead overrides in there too for a few critters around the place (see the list in the "Sprucing up ye olde NWN" link in my sig). I've used that for so long in my normal play, I forgot what the regular ones look like.

"God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them."-- Stephen William Hawking (b. 1942) --

Some Avlis fun with the new MakePano console command in NWN:EE. This is just a quick first attempt at lower res (don't look too close or the bad seams will show). I don't use the depth of field frame-buffer option (kinda crappy so far), and the vibrance one adds way too much color for my liking there... but it is just a "let's see if this works" test.

Updated my Zvid test pic above without scaling it down, and fixed the crappy seam job a bit. Every small increase in resolution increases the size by a lot though (almost 5 megs now).

I'll mess around with other image formats later (and tweaking the game capture parameters), but increasing jpeg compression is as bad as lowering the scale or resolution. Gifv or png might work, if I can find places that host it, but panorama shots that zoom well do not like low quality stuff.

"God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them."-- Stephen William Hawking (b. 1942) --

This is more of an FYI post, but I found a much easier/better way for hosting and linking panoramas, with the zoom feature (and more), if anyone else want to do it. Google will make them for you (even just tossing multiple pics in your account), but the results aren't great (I got some horrible artifacts added to the first 2 pre-made pano shots with whatever they did to re-convert it).

Something new I'm trying is just hosting on any site that allows external re-linking* (like Imgur), then use a free CND service to do the rest. The Pannellum: Simple Tutorial page takes your link and spits out the 360 shot for you to use here, and is very fast. I could use my own site even with the simple install for it, but the CDN service is much better.* Unfortunately my first choice, the Avlis Gallery, is limited to 2 megs per pic, so not so good for big panoramas.

No more crappy re-compositing, and it has full zoom, plus it can link up panoramas like those street maps and virtual tours, as they did on the main page library shot (no tour feature with the simple upload thing, but any site can install it).

Yeah, I like toys. Now I need to go make some better ones.

*edits* I redid the first one with a better field of view to match the display scale, so it isn't like "Avlis in a fish bowl", and better vertical blending coverage (more screenshots up and down). Also there are reduced sizes from another viewpoint below, (still crappy resolution, but this is just fiddling around ). The first one above has a lot more detail, but the ones below are much smaller (half-res), so it is a trade-off (until I find better ways of doing it). I won't even link the really crappy 600k version.

Interesting note: It looks like rendered light bloom effects from the lamps in that shot don't agree with the pano-splicing. There are 4 different ones in the original set of pictures it was made from, but it must have has a fit, thinking "follow the yellow brick road", and just made one light tunnelish thing around the path out of Zvid.

"God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them."-- Stephen William Hawking (b. 1942) --

I was able to tweak things so I could keep the double resolution (8192x4096), and still have the compression cranked up, so the file sizes are much smaller now (compared to almost twice the size before). I should be able to improve on that too.

I chose the area for this because of the regular spawns it normally has (crystal golems spawning like crazy, with vfx everywhere for EE to chew on), but I ran into one of the bugs EE brought back, that was fixed before. The horrible creature stacking issue, where you get them all piled into the same spot. A screen shot of stacks of 10 of them together is just a blur, so I had to improvise for things to fight instead (had some fun too). The stacking thing should get fixed soon (I hope).

*Edit* Interesting note: Now that I'm manually editing the exif data to register it as a "360 photo" (like you can make with your phone), Google doesn't have to re-convert it, so they work quite well there. Better zooming as well.Same pic in my Google Photos:Old Avlis with new guests: 8x4k (2.82 MB)

"God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them."-- Stephen William Hawking (b. 1942) --